Daily Humiliation, Presence

Oldest on the Water Slides

August 6, 2022

I was the oldest person in line for the water slides at the water park this week.

Not just by a little. By a lot.

We have season passes for Discovery Kingdom, an amusement park that is probably too far away for us to actually utilize season passes, but since it is just about the same price to visit once as to buy a season pass, we keep renewing them, and then hope that we will find time to get there at least a few times during the summer. Plus the season passes come with free parking! And since parking is $25 a day, the passes make sense for that benefit alone.

A bonus is that the amusement park company also owns a nearby water park, so our passes get us free admission and parking there, too. It was the last full week of vacation before school starts (boo!), so my son and I were reaching our “now or never” time for this summer’s activities.  We finally made it down for a visit this week.

The water park is about 120 miles away, so it’s not truly free to go there, not after you pay for gas. But since our nearby water park is charging $50 a head for admission now, a day trip didn’t seem like a bad idea. It’s also always nice to spend time with my son, and although he was on his phone for most of the drive, being together in the same space is a gift.

We went on four slides, total.  Three of them required you to grab a tube from a pile at the bottom of the slide and then to walk up numerous flights of stairs to get to the top, where well-trained teenaged life guards made sure that everybody waited their turn and behaved.

As my son and I climbed our way up flight after flight of stairs, I noticed something about the people in line with us. Continue Reading…

Presence, Security

In Fire Season, the Sequel

July 30, 2022

My neighbors took their extra pickup truck, packed it with things that they would never want to lose, and drove it to a friend’s house in Sacramento for the duration of fire season. (Which makes me wonder: What would it be like to have not just one truck, but an extra one, too?) My next door neighbor has suitcases lined up in her hallway; she is taking them to her boyfriend’s house in Davis. I am going to move my massage table into the backseat of the car soon, so there will be room in the trunk for a few of my most sentimental, irreplaceable things: a quilt my Grandma made, memory books with my children’s early art work, handwritten letters from my Mom and Dad.

Welcome (back) to fire season in Northern California.

(Not the first time I’ve written about this, I’m afraid. Probably won’t be the last, either.)

I started thinking about go-bags again today. I have a little one packed, but it’s not complete. And the tricky thing about the go-bag is that sometimes you forget what is in there, and so you start panicking when you can’t find something and you know where it was supposed to be (the dog’s shot records?) but then finally remember that you took it out of the file cabinet and put it in the go-bag, but not until you’ve wasted a lot of time looking for it.

Then there’s this problem: what happens if the fire breaks out when you are not home? Should the go-bag with the passports and passwords and medical records and business records live in the car, too? What is more likely, that the car could get broken into and all of that information stolen, or that the house could get swallowed by a horrific fire when you are not home to grab your go-bag? Also, who is to say that the car won’t catch on fire in some random act of nature one day when you are driving home?

(One of my on-line writing friends suggested that I scan all my important documents and back them up to the cloud. That’s a great idea! I should do it! I think I could do a good enough job just with apps on my phone. So why don’t I do this? What is my resistance? Because clearly there is some strong resistance there, since I haven’t done it yet.)

Bottom line?

I’m not sure that any of us forest dwelling folk feel safe at home anymore, at least not during fire season. Continue Reading…